The Harder They Fall

I woke up this morning intending to finally put some thoughts down about Te'o (not the ones you might expect, however), and I still intend to in the near future. But the conference championships today caused me to think about a couple things, and I wanted to address them before I forgot some of the nuances rolling around in my head. Strike while the iron's hot, right?

By now, you've probably seen this play. If not, I'll wait while you watch it.



I've never seen an NFL player fall like that. Ridley looked like a marionette whose strings had been cut. It was scary, one of those hits where you know the guy is knocked out right away. It looked to me like he was twitching immediately after falling to the ground - something which caused me to (perhaps irrationally) become extremely concerned, as the image I have burned into my mind of somebody twitching after falling to the ground is Apollo Creed. Granted, that's in a movie, but still.  And of course, it was noted Patriot-killer Bernard Pollard who hit him. He's now injured somebody at every offensive skill position besides fullback - which, considering the Pats don't usually use one, is something that I suppose bodes well for the future (Pollard having now fulfilled whatever contract to hurt each one of the skill positions that he signed with somebody that really, really dislikes New England).

Now, yes, I know that Ridley lowered his head. I know that Pollard didn't launch himself at Ridley. But the fact remains that, under NFL rules, Stevan Ridley was legally knocked out by a helmet-to-helmet hit.

Meanwhile, over in the NFC Championship game, an Atlanta defensive lineman was flagged for more or less slapping Colin Kaepernick in the facemask on a follow-through swipe attempting to knock the ball down. Kaepernick was utterly unfazed by the contact, and yet, San Francisco got 15 yards and a 1st down out of it.

Something's wrong when I can write those last two paragraphs and not worry about their veracity.

Look, I get that the NFL is a high-speed game and some collisions are unavoidable. I get that runners aren't technically "defenseless." I get that the Atlanta player technically committed "a hit to the head of the quarterback." But if the league is really that concerned about player safety, something has to give in the practical discrepancy between those two rules. Let's see them start by outlawing any kind of helmet-to-helmet contact. Maybe then we'll see less of these fool running backs attempting to use their heads as a battering ram. Because for every Jacquizz Rodgers running over Earl Thomas (a highlight that was disturbingly widely praised), there's a Stevan Ridley.

Side note: it was utterly surreal to see a scrum of players fighting for a fumble, and then a Baltimore player jumping around for joy when he came out with the ball, when Ridley was laying concussed and potentially worse on the ground not 2 yards away. The NFL can talk up how important player safety is to them all they want. That horrifying minute or so was a perfect microcosm of how far the league has to go.

The other thing I was pondering today has to do with being a fan. I'm a Sox fan, first and foremost. Always have been, always will be. But to be perfectly honest, I've usually taken Patriots losses harder (with the exception, of course, of Game 162) in the past few years.

I can remember after the Super Bowl last year, standing up as Brady's Hail Mary soared into the air and then collapsing back down onto the couch after it hit the turf. I was disconsolate for a good few minutes after, just kind of staring off into some corner of the room. It was very strange, as if I couldn't quite process the cold, hard fact the Patriots had lost. It was very similar to the end of Super Bowl XLII - the thought had never really crossed my mind that New England could actually lose that night. 19-0 was a foregone conclusion. It was just kind of a given in my head that the guys in blue would come out on top. And then today, I spent several plays that didn't work in the home team's favor desperately searching for a thrown flag, the imaginary do-over button - anything that would erase what had just happened.

It's the downside to being a fan of such a successful team. It may sound completely wrong-headed, but being a Patriots fan or a Yankees fan (to use two famous examples) is a double-edged sword. Your team is so successful so often that you not only are bored by success, but you come to expect that success. It's a shock when the Patriots don't win, to be honest. I go into a game every week expecting them to win, because that's what they do. They win more often than anybody else, year in and year out with mind-numbing consistency. So when things don't go according to the usual plan, it's hugely disappointing and barely able to be reconciled in your mind.

I suspect that this is even more pronounced in football than it is in baseball, or really any other sport. Over the course of a 162-game season, the Yankees could be amazing but still lose 40 percent of their games. Losing is just kind of taken for granted more than every once in a while in baseball - so long as the end result is positive, fans will excuse the sporadic hiccups against the Mariners and Astros of the world. I expect the Red Sox to do well every year, but the individual losses aren't as jarring. And they don't have the track record the Patriots do - yes, two world championships in the past nine years is incredible, but the Patriots have been in the Super Bowl five times since 2001, won it three times and have two other AFC Championship game appearances to boot. Additionally, in football, if you lose 40 percent of your games, you're 10-6 and fighting for a wild card spot. Losing against a bad team in any given game is much rarer.

But when you think about it, maybe fans like me are just deluding themselves. Only one team can hoist that trophy every year - and the law of averages (or at least parity) says that it can't always be your team, no matter what your calculus of imagined scenarios says. We've become so spoiled by the seemingly easy routine of continual success that sometimes we forget just how hard it is to pull the whole thing off, and so come crashing down from extraordinarily high hopes when things don't work out.

Even with all that in mind and at the risk of sounding arrogant, however, it still hurts like hell when your team loses. Patriots (and Yankees, to continue the example) fans live and die with the team just like everybody else does. So cut us some slack, those of you who say you don't feel bad for us when our team end up back at home watching the championship just like yours.

Go Sawx.